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3 Nov, 2014

Spain imposes ‘Google Tax’ – The Hindu

The Spanish government has successfully passed a new copyright law which imposes fees for online content aggregators such as Google News, in an effort to protect its print media industry.

The new intellectual property law, known popularly as the “Google Tax” or by its initials LPI, requires services which post links and excerpts of news articles to pay a fee to the organisation representing Spanish newspapers, the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies (known by its Spanish-language abbreviation AEDE). Failure to pay up can lead to a fine of up to €600,000.

The law is the latest volley in the war between European newspapers and Google. The publishers accuse the search firm of using their copyrighted material to build up a news service without doing any reporting of its own; Google defends itself by claiming that it secured 10 billion views to newspapers’ websites every month.

Read the rest: Spain imposes ‘Google Tax’ – The Hindu.